The Dressmaker (22 page)

Tilly held her arms out to him again but he shook his head – no – and her singing heart fell flat.

‘I have something to tell you,’ he said in an old voice.

‘What?’

He faded – she cried out but he was moving away too quickly. Baby Pablo looked down at her and said, ‘Mother.’

It was daylight, the sun shining on her through the window, so she got up and went to find her mother. Molly sat upright in her wheelchair by the stove, dressed, her hair brushed. She’d re-kindled the fire and was gently pulling the fibre threads and material strips from the armrests of her chair and throwing them into the flames. The hard dirt-shiny cushions that were usually stuffed about her thighs and back were gone. In the flames old boiled eggs, serviettes wound tight in lumps and chicken legs caught the golden flames and melted to embers. Molly ceased working and looked up at her daughter. ‘Good morning, Myrtle,’ she said in a soft voice. Tilly paused with the kettle at the stove to look down at her mother, amazed. She picked some lemon grass and was standing watching the lemon bits float about on the hot water in her cup when Molly spoke again. ‘I had a dream last night,’ she said, ‘about a baby. A bonny, round baby with dimples in his knees and elbows, and two perfect teeth.’ The old lady looked closely at Tilly. ‘It was your baby.’

Tilly turned away.

‘I lost a baby too,’ said Molly, ‘I lost my little girl.’

Tilly sat down in Teddy’s chair and looked at her mother. ‘I was working in Paris,’ she said haltingly, ‘I had my own shop and lots of clients and friends, a boyfriend, my partner – his name was Ormond, he was English. We had a baby, my baby, a boy we called Pablo, just because we liked the name. We were going to bring him here then take you back with us, but when Pablo was seven months old I found him one morning in his cot … dead.’ Tilly stopped and took a long deep breath. She had only ever told this story once, to Teddy.

‘He died, he just died. Ormond didn’t understand, he blamed me and couldn’t forgive me – but the doctors said it must have been a virus, although he hadn’t been sick. Ormond left me so I had to come home – I had nothing anymore, it all seemed so pointless and cruel. I decided I could at least help my mother.’ She stopped again and sipped her tea. ‘I realised I still had something here. I thought I could live back here, I thought that here I could do no more harm and so I would do good.’ She looked at the flames. ‘It isn’t fair.’

Molly reached out and patted her daughter’s shoulder with her flat soft hands. ‘It isn’t fair, but you may never have gotten out of this place, you could have been stuck here hiding with me on top of this hill if you hadn’t been sent away, and there is time for you yet.’

‘It hasn’t been fair for you.’

‘I suppose. I was a spinster when your … well, I was naive. But I don’t care, I ended up with you. To think I almost married that man, your “father”. We could have been stuck with him as well! I’ve never told you who –’

‘No need,’ said Tilly, ‘Miss Dimm told me in primary school. I didn’t believe her at first but then when Stewy …’

Molly shivered, ‘I wouldn’t give my baby away so I had to leave my home and my parents. He came after me and used me. I had no money, no job and an illegitimate child to support. He kept us …’ Molly sighed. ‘Then when he couldn’t have his son anymore, I couldn’t have you.’ Molly wiped tears from her eyes and looked directly at Tilly. ‘I went mad with loneliness for you, I’d lost the only friend I had, the only thing I had, but over the years I came to hope you wouldn’t come back to this awful place.’ She looked at her hands in her lap, ‘Sometimes things just don’t
seem
fair.’

‘Why didn’t you ever leave?’

She said very softly. ‘I had nowhere to go,’ and she looked at Tilly with love, her soft, old face with its high cheekbones and creamy, creased complexion. ‘He wouldn’t let them tell me where you were. I never knew where you were.’

‘You waited?’

‘They took you away in a police car and that’s all I knew.’

Tilly got on her knees in front of her mother and buried her face in her lap, and Molly stroked her head fondly and they wept. Sorry, so sorry, they said to each other.

In the afternoon Molly fell. Tilly was in the garden picking soapwort for salad when she heard the thack of Molly’s walking stick slapping the floor boards. Tilly lay her flat gently, then sprinted down to Pratts. She found Sergeant Farrat at the haberdashery counter.

She ran back to squat by her mother and soothed her and held her hand, but even breathing caused Molly distress and any slight movement sent her face into contortions. She fell in and out of consciousness.

Sergeant Farrat brought Mr Almanac. He stood over Molly, lying on her back on the kitchen floor boards.

‘I think she broke her femur or something when she fell,’ said Tilly, ‘she’s in terrible pain.’

‘Didn’t trip on a rug so it must have been a stroke,’ said Mr Almanac, ‘nothing to be done, just keep her still. God will see to her.’

‘Can you give her something for the pain?’

‘Can’t do anything for stroke.’ Mr Almanac inched away.

‘Please, she’s in pain.’

‘She’ll be in a coma soon,’ he said, ‘be dead by morning.’

She stood quickly and raised her hands, lunging at him to shove him and send him rolling and cracking down The Hill to smash into fifty fractured pieces, but Sergeant Farrat caught her and held her to his big warm body. He helped her put the broken old lady to bed while Molly howled with pain and hit out for anything she could hurt back, but her clenched fists fell like light hail on Sergeant Farrat’s wool coat. Then he drove Mr Almanac away.

He returned with some pills for Molly. ‘I phoned the doctor but he’s away from Winyerp, thirty miles out at a breech birth.’

He watched Tilly grind hemp in a mortar and pestle then scrape it into boiling honey. When the mix had cooled she spilled it onto Molly’s tongue so that it slid down her throat. She squatted by the poppies with a razor blade and a cup but the seed pods were too ripe and the white liquid wouldn’t dribble, so they ripped the poppies from the earth and chopped the seed pods until they were like gravel then boiled them in water. Tilly spooned the poppy tea between Molly’s soft lips but Molly frowned and flung her bony head from side to side. ‘No,’ she whispered, ‘No.’

He helped her rub Molly’s tissue-skin with comfrey oil, he mopped her cold brow with dandelion water and he wiped green-tinted mucus from the corners of her eyes with salt water. They sponged and powdered her with lavender dust and held her hands while they sang hymns – ‘Be thou my Guardian and my Guide, And hear me when I call; Let not my slippery footsteps slide, And hold me lest I fall.’

Near to dawn Molly shoved the sheets away from her rattling breast and began to pluck at them. She sucked air through the dry black hole that was her mouth, rasping in out, in and out, and by the time dawn broke, had slipped further. Only her breathing remained. Her body had turned limp and still in her bed, her chest rose and fell, rose and fell with shallow sparse breaths answering the life-long impulse, but finally her chest fell and did not rise again. Tilly held her mother’s hand until it was no longer warm.

• • •

Sergeant Farrat left her and when the sun was high he returned with the undertaker and the doctor from Win-yerp. They brought with them the smell of whisky and antiseptic. They arranged a funeral. ‘The burial will be tomorrow,’ said the undertaker.

Tilly was astonished. ‘Tomorrow?’

‘Health regulations – the only place to keep corpses here is in Reg’s coolroom behind Pratts,’ said the doctor.

Tilly sat on her smoky veranda until night came, trembling in waves, sad fever washing through her. The tip ash skipped down to settle in her hair, and the fire lines at the tip glowed in the dark like a city miles away. She could tie up the loose ends, leave, go to Melbourne, take a job with the traveller who’d visited last autumn.

Yet there was the matter of the sour people of Dungatar. In light of all they had done, and what they had not done, what they had decided not to do – they mustn’t be abandoned. Not yet.

Some people have more pain than they deserve, some don’t. She stood on top of The Hill and howled, wailed like a banshee until lights flicked on and small dots glowed from the houses.

She walked to the meat safe behind Pratts. She stood looking at her mother’s casket, lying darkly, a shadow in a sad place, as Molly’s presence had always been.

‘Pain will no longer be our curse, Molly,’ she said. ‘It will be our revenge and our reason. I have made it my catalyst and my propeller. It seems only fair don’t you think?’

It rained cats and dogs all night as Tilly slept lightly in her mother’s bed. They came to see her, just briefly, and filled her heart. Teddy waved then looked to Pablo in Molly’s arms and they smiled a silver smile. Then they were gone.

S
ergeant Farrat put his hand across his forehead and leaned over his log book to write. ‘What time is the funeral?’ said Beula.

‘Two pm.’

‘Are you going, Sergeant?’

He took his hand away and looked up into her eager, pine-coloured eyes, ‘Yes.’

‘Can anyone go?’

‘Anyone can go Beula, but only good people with respectful intentions should attend don’t you think? Without Tilly’s tolerance and generosity, her patience and skills, our lives – mine especially – would not have been enriched. Since you are not sincere about her feelings or about her dear mother and only want to go to stickybeak – well it’s just plain ghoulish isn’t it?’ Sergeant Farrat reddened but held her gaze.

‘Well!’ she said, and headed to Pratts. ‘Hello Muriel.’

‘Morning Beula.’

‘Is she out there?’ she said, jerking her head towards the meat safe.

‘If you want to look –’

‘Going to the funeral?’ Beula asked sharply.

‘Well I –’

‘Sergeant Farrat said if she hasn’t enriched our lives in any way and since we haven’t been patient and respectful it would be insincere and we’re just being ghouls and stickybeaks.’

Muriel crossed her arms. ‘I’m no stickybeak.’

Alvin came out from his office. His wife kept her eyes on Beula and said flatly, ‘Beula says that Sergeant Farrat said if we went to the funeral we’d only be ghoulish and that we never had any patience or respect for Molly so we’d just be stickybeaking.’

‘We should by rights shut the door when a hearse and procession goes past, but I doubt there’ll be one,’ said Alvin, and picked up the docket book.

Lois Pickett lumbered in through the front door and up to the counter saying, ‘I fink we should go to the funeral, don’t youse?’

‘Why?’ said Muriel, ‘are you Tilly’s friend or are you just going to go for a “stickybeak” as Sergeant Farrat says?’

‘She’s still got mendin’ of mine see –’

‘It would be insincere to go, Lois,’ said Beula.

‘Ghoulish, according to Sergeant Farrat,’ said Muriel.

‘Well I suppose …’ said Lois and scratched her head. ‘Do youse fink there’s somethink going on between the sarge and Tilly?’

‘What do you mean?’ shot Muriel.

‘An affair,’ said Beula, ‘I always suspected it.’

‘Nothing would surprise me,’ said Muriel.

Alvin rolled his eyes and walked back to his office.

• • •

Sergeant Farrat arrived to collect Tilly wearing a black knee-length wool-crepe frock with a draped neck, a stylish lampshade overskirt cut assymetrically, black stockings and sensible black pumps with a discreet leather flower stitched to the heel. ‘Molly would disapprove,’ he smiled, ‘can’t you just see her expression?’

‘Your dress will be ruined in this rain.’

‘I can always make another one and besides, I have a nice blue cape and umbrella in the car.’

She looked at him and frowned.

‘I don’t care, Tilly,’ he said, ‘I’m beyond caring what those people think or say anymore. I’m sure everyone’s seen what’s on my clothes line over the years, and I’m just about due to retire anyway.’ He offered her his elbow.

‘The rain will keep the crowds away,’ said Tilly and they stepped from the veranda to the police car.

Reginald drove Molly to her resting place in Pratts’ grocery van, then leaned on it to watch the two mourners, their hair plastered to their foreheads and their faces screwed in the rain. Sergeant Farrat clasped his hands together under his cape and raised his voice above the grey din. ‘Molly Dunnage came to Dungatar with a babe-in-arms to start a new life. She hoped to leave behind her troubles, but hers was a life lived with trouble travelling alongside and so Molly lived as discreetly as she possibly could in the full glare of scrutiny and torment. Her heart will rest easier knowing Myrtle again before she died.

‘We bid Molly farewell and in our sadness, our anger and our disbelief we beg for Molly a better life hereafter, a life of love and acceptance and we wish for her everlasting peace – for I suspect that is all she ever wished for herself. That is what, in her heart, she would have wanted for anyone.’

Councillor Evan Pettyman, on behalf of the Dun-gatar Shire Council, had sent a wreath. Tilly scooped it from the top of the coffin with the shovel then dropped it on the sodden clay at her feet and sliced it into tiny wedges. Reginald stepped forward to help them lower Molly to rest. Flat raindrops plopped, smacked a rat ta tat tat at the coffin top, as Tilly dropped the first clod of earth onto her mother’s final bed.

The men stood respectfully in the rain either side of the thin girl in the big wet hat. She leaned on the shovel, shuddering in a grey crying sky, mud stuck to her boots and caked to the cuffs of her trousers. ‘I will miss you,’ she cried, ‘I will just go on missing you as I always have.’

Reginald handed Sergeant Farrat the bill for the cost of the casket and hire of Alvin’s van. The sergeant put it in his pocket, took the shovel from Tilly and said, ‘Let’s tuck Molly in, then go and drink laced tea until we feel some understanding has been reached on behalf of Molly Dunnage and the life she was given.’

Tilly held the umbrella over the sergeant as he shovelled, the blue cape stuck in folds about him, his black pumps sinking in the clay. The rain trickled down, darkening his stockings.